If Fight at the Flag! is the best tactical advice I can offer in the battlegrounds of Azeroth, establishing graveyard control is the best strategic advice I can give. It’s an essential concept to understanding how battlegrounds are won and lost, but it’s not an easy one to grasp at first glance.

Graveyard control doesn’t have a catchphrase that can be shouted out in /bg chat. It’s not something that has an easy, universal application. Sometimes it involves making calls that seem counterintuitive, or downright crazy to other players.

But believe me when I say it’s absolutely critical to winning.

RESURRECTION VECTORS

What happens when you die? Where do you go?

This is not a metaphysical question in the battlegrounds, but instead a matter of deep pragmatism and strategy. When you die you aren’t taken out of the battle permanently. Instead, you’re sent to the closest penalty box, told to go sit in the corner and think about what you’ve done, and wait out your resurrection by the local friendly spirit healer. Running back to your corpse is a bad idea, because all it takes is one enemy to loot your insignia and… poof, you’re stuck away from the graveyard with no corpse to reenter.

Resurrection waves come every 30 seconds, as the spirit healer … I don’t know, needs to recharge? Wants to make sure you’ve thought about what you’ve done wrong? Whatever it is, every 30 seconds the graveyards pop out another set of reborn heroes, ready to buff up and fight again.

Which graveyard you go to depends upon where you died: you always go to the closest graveyard under your side’s control to your corpse. This is what I call your resurrection vector – the direction you will go when you die.

Understanding where you and your teammates will go when you die is important. Knowing where your opponents go when they die is critical. Why?

Because by controlling which graveyards are available to them means you can relocate your opponents to places which no longer have strategic value. You can send them away from the node you are attacking, away from the flag room, away from keep defense, all by controlling which graveyards are available to them.

In some battlegrounds, like Arathi Basin and Eye of the Storm, the graveyards are closely aligned with the respective nodes. If the Alliance controls the Blood Elf Tower, fallen defenders will resurrect at the nearby graveyard down the slope. If the Horde controls the Blacksmith, their dead will return from the graveyard on the other side of the building. In other battlegrounds, like Alterac Valley and Strand of the Ancients, they are not associated with specific objectives, but are rather separate places to contest and control.

Because the graveyards are completely disassociated from the towers in Alterac Valley, let’s use AV as our example to illustrate how resurrection vectors and graveyard control works.

THE NINE GRAVEYARDS OF ALTERAC VALLEY

Alterac Valley is an epic battleground. Seriously, it’s huge. Including the 9 graveyards, there are 23 objectives in the battleground to be controlled or destroyed. If we added in all the quest-related objectives, there are over 30 different objectives, but since those rarely come into play these days let’s narrow our focus to just the graveyards.

Did I mention this place was big?

Each side begins with 3 graveyards and their spawn point: Stonehearth (SHGY), Stormpike (SPGY), and the Dun Baldar Aid Station (AS) for Alliance, Iceblood (IBGY), Frostwolf (FWGY) and Frostwolf Village Relief Hut (RH) for Horde. Snowfall Graveyard (SFGY) is neutral at the start.

It will take you at least 5 battles before you figure out where all the graveyards are while playing. Seriously. And then people will only speak in acronyms, so those subtle differences between SHGY and SPGY (and Icewing versus Iceblood) will still trip you up.

The two caves (Dun Baldar Pass and Rock of Durotan) are the initial spawn points. Players will get sent back there if there are no other graveyards available. Since they are a little special, I’ll fade them out until they become important in future diagrams.

Graveyards, like the towers in AV, need to spend 4 minutes in a neutral state before they change to the opposing side. So for the first 4 minutes of the game, the Alliance cannot resurrect any further south than Stonehearth and the Horde is forced back to Iceblood. This means that any casualties on the other side of the Field of Strife will come back across midfield and reset there. The resurrection vectors during this initial time look like this:

The simple way to say all of this is, if you are Alliance:

If you are south of the fork in the road by the lake, you will rez at Stonehearth.

If you’re north of it but east of the bridge, you’re probably going to Stormpike.

If you’re west of the bridge in Dun Baldar, you’re going to the Aid Station.

If you are Horde, it’s a little more linear:

If you are north of Tower Point, you’re going to rez at Iceblood.

If you are south of Tower Point but north of Frostwolf Keep, you’re going to Frostwolf.

If you are in Frostwolf Keep, you’re rezzing at the Relief Hut.

Obviously, this all starts to change once the battle begins, depending on the strategies used by each side. But in many cases, this initial setup is going to be the one we keep coming back to over and over again.

Let’s look at a few common AV scenarios to see how graveyard control works in practice.

THE ALTERAC BLITZ

The Alterac Blitz is when you focus upon one thing, and one thing only — killing the enemy general as quickly as possible. Whatever defense is offered by the blitzing side is irrelevant; the key is that there is a coordinated effort to get as many people to the opposite end of the map to kill the general. Any towers or graveyards assaulted are incidental; the key is killing the general.

The Blitz is extremely challenging at lower gear levels due to the presence of 4 very big, very angry adds surrounding the general. Each Warmaster or Marshall is linked to 1 of the 4 towers on that side, so the more towers that are up, the more adds are in the room.

Did I mention the buff they give the general, too? Oh yeah. Each one gives a +25% stacking buff to the general’s health and damage. Stacking. So if all 4 towers are up, the boss is +144% health and damage, and there are 4 adds in the room who can’t be pulled separately.

Before ToC and ICC, the most common way to do this was to run 2 well-geared tanks, 4+ healers, and as many DPS as could fit all the way down the map, where the MT would tank the general, the OT would tank the adds, and everyone would DPS as fast as possible to get the boss kill. As gear improved, however, single-tanking the room became possible. Watching a single ICC-25 geared tank hold aggro on the entire room is an awesome, awesome sight. But no matter how it’s done, the map almost always looks the same.

The only graveyard that each side usually takes is the one right next to the general: the Aid Station and Relief Hut. And the Alliance takes Snowfall Graveyard, because it’s right next to their running path across the Field of Strife. Someone always peels off to assault it.

However, because the Blitz is so fast, the resurrection vectors are still mostly in their initial state. They’re a little worse for defenders if the AS and RH are actually assaulted, as any deaths will send them outside the defensive bulwarks of their respective bases, but for the offense the resurrection vectors are even worse. You can’t continue the assault if you are suddenly 2/3rds of the map away, either at Iceblood or Stonehearth. Any losses by the offense cannot be replaced. Less obviously, casualties can’t switch to defense because they are 1/3rds of the field away from their own base, and (usually) the opponent is already pulling the general. So you can’t attack, you can’t defend.

Your only real hope at that point is hoping your opponent wipes on the general as well.

The Alterac Blitz is a high risk, high reward strategy. When it works, it’s brilliant. And when it fails, it fails spectacularly. It is highly dependent upon clutch performances by a few people — the tank(s) and healers — and as such is easily disrupted. A single stealthed druid casting Typhoon at the right moment will wipe your entire Blitz.

The Alterac Blitz completely ignores graveyard control in favor of achieving the victory condition. If you wipe, you are completely at the mercy of your opponent. What’s scary is that the graveyard map above is the best case scenario for the Blitz; if your opponent assaults all the graveyards along the way, you can be sent all the way back to your spawning cave!

I don’t like the Blitz. More specifically, I don’t like the current incarnation of the Blitz and how it plays out. It can work, and it can work well when properly executed. With the right team, you can rack up an impressive number of wins in a short period of time. But those Blitzes are sadly the exception, not the rule. Too many Blitzes start without a solid tanking and healing team identified, yet the entire strategy depends upon them. Charging the enemy general without knowing how you’re going to kill them is like going all in during a poker game before the cards are even dealt. It’s foolish.

The Blitz focuses upon the PvE aspects of the battleground to the exclusion of the PvP. If you do it right, your team never comes into contact with enemy players, or perhaps brief contact with their defenders in the enemy base. If you really Blitz right, it’s nothing more than a competitive PvE race to kill a boss.

Before 3.3.3, the Blitz was a good way to grind honor if your team was good and your opposition didn’t know what was going on. I don’t think it’s nearly as good of an honor grind now with the advent of the Random Battleground Finder and massive honor boosts in all the battlegrounds, so hopefully people will start looking at other ways to play AV.

The Blitz requires a team to commit to it fully because the price of failure is so high. Recovery from a failed Blitz is very difficult because of the complete lack of graveyard control and the resurrection vectors present at the time of the wipe.

ISLAND HOPPING

In contrast to the Blitz, where no graveyard control is displayed, Island Hopping battles focus on isolating the opponent from effectively attacking or defending. The key is skipping non-essential targets and focusing your attention on taking towers while defending your own territory. While sometimes you’ll see this strategy used during Blitzes, the Blitz is over too soon for graveyard control to matter.

(Island Hopping is the strategy used by the United States in the Pacific Theater of WWII; whenever an island had no strategic value, the US simply moved around it to the next target.)

Alterac Valley’s map is asymmetrical, and those differences of geography matter while Island Hopping. Here’s what it would look like if both sides hopped but conveniently forgot to defend:

You can see both sides have taken each graveyard along the way but one. That one graveyard becomes the place where all casualties over the entire map will go. For some, it will mean moving forward. For many, it will mean going backwards. But for all of them it means getting sent out of position.

The above map doesn’t show any defense — we’ll get to that in a second. But for each side, it takes the least advantageous graveyard for the opponent and sends casualties there. Let’s take each in turn.

The Horde should skip Stonehearth Graveyard because:

Stonehearth does not control a choke point, unlike Stormpike GY.

It is on the wrong side of the Icewing choke point, allowing the Horde to use IWB as a defensive bulwark.

Stormpike GY is useful as an assault point against Dun Baldar, even if the Aid Station is still under Alliance control, both due to closeness and straight LoS across the bridge.

Sending Alliance casualties to Stormpike only gives the bridge as a defense against their rez waves. Sending the Alliance to Stonehearth allows the road and canyons to be used as additional defenses against Alliance trying to get to Dun Baldar.

The worst thing you can say about leaving Stonehearth in Alliance hands is that does make taking the two adjacent bunkers more difficult for the Horde. But a common way around that is to wait for Snowfall to go Alliance, and then assault Stonehearth anyways. At that point Snowfall graveyard becomes a trap.

An important thing to consider is the location of the Alliance Cave. If no graveyards are available for you to resurrect in, you go back to the cave. The Alliance cave is more defensible than the Horde cave, and it’s very easy to get to Dun Baldar. Sending Alliance casualties back there is less optimal than sending them to either Stonehearth or Snowfall, like so:

Smart Horde players will look and see if the Alliance captured Snowfall before taking Stonehearth. Ideally, the Horde should wait until Snowfall is actually under Alliance control before taking Stonehearth away. And at no point should they try to send them back to the cave in Dun Baldar pass, because that’s too close to Dun Baldar and SPGY.

Astonishingly, the situation is somewhat more complicated when we look at the Alliance’s situation.

THE PROBLEM OF FROSTWOLF GRAVEYARD

The rule of thumb when playing Alliance is: skip taking FWGY unless you want to have a lot of players yell at you. The conventional wisdom is that taking FWGY will lead to a turtle; more specifically, taking FWGY before the Relief Hut will lead to a turtle.

The idea is relatively straightforward and has some merit. If Frostwolf Keep and Village are heavily defended, Horde casualties will be sent back to the Relief Hut, where they can further fortify the position, causing a defensive war at the bulwark. If FWGY is still under Horde control, casualties at the bulwark move forward to FWGY, on the other side of the defenses, so that they have to run through the gauntlet to rejoin the fight. While you’re now fighting a two-front battle, at least the FWGY forces are being corralled into narrow passageways, unlike those still inside the Keep.

Let’s take a look and see the result of this strategy. If FWGY is allowed to remain under Horde control, this is what the map looks like after a few minutes:

The tactical situation within Frostwolf Keep is exactly as predicted; casualties are going to FWGY, north of the defenses. The biggest problem is that all Horde casualties are going to a spot just north of the Alliance offensive, where they can turn south and demolish them. The only thing that saves the Alliance offense is that the Horde casualties come in small waves, instead of one large group. If the Horde groups up in FWGY and then does a concerted assault on the Alliance in keep, they can do a lot of damage.

Now, the conventional wisdom is actually completely, 100% correct here. If you take FWGY before RH, then all casualties, all over the map, will go to the Relief Hut and make Frostwolf Village a defensive monster. So skipping FWGY in favor of RH makes sense. (Taking FWGY after RH doesn’t really matter, because the Horde Cave is right across the field. It actually worsens the Horde position somewhat to do so, but people will still complain you took FWGY.)

But look at the map again, and compare the resurrection vectors to the Horde map.

By hopping over Stonehearth and Snowfall graveyards, the Horde create a situation where the Alliance is sent to the middle of the map. This is bad when the middle of the map is being contested, but very good for the ends — which means assaulting Dun Baldar and defending Frostwolf Keep.

The problem with the Alliance map isn’t Frostwolf graveyard, it’s Iceblood and Snowfall.

IBGY is the best graveyard in the game from a terrain and positioning standpoint. Like Stonehearth, it’s close to two towers. Iceblood is on the defensive side of the chokepoint, however, whereas Stonehearth is on offensive side. Furthermore, IBGY is the only graveyard in the game that doesn’t resurrect you in a canyon; you can turn and immediately ride north across the Field of Strife without passing the graveyard flag. Every other graveyard forces you to travel some distance before you get back into the battleground, but not IBGY. You can reinforce the defense or offense from it. It’s perfect for protecting TP and IBT, and control of it blocks the chokepoint.

Snowfall, on the other hand, is probably the worst graveyard in the game, but it is irresistible to Alliance. The Alliance path across the Field of Strife favors the west side towards Galv and IBT, while the Horde favor the right to SHB and Bal. The ramp to SFGY is right there when you’re running south as Alliance. Someone always peels off to go cap it. And while it might help during the assault on IBT/TP, it becomes a serious liability when the Alliance gets to FWGY.

IBGY is too good not to take, and SFGY is too easy not to.

I said in the very beginning that graveyard control sometimes makes you do crazy, non-intuitive things. This is one of those situations where in order to get your opponent’s resurrection vectors to go where you want, you are probably going to have to do some crazy things.

Either:

Take all the graveyards except FWGY, and move your defensive line south of the Field of Strife. Hold the Tower Point checkpoint as strongly as you can and let no Horde pass. Trinket back if a stealther gets through.

Take all the graveyards and bottle the Horde up in the Cave. This only works if there’s a large difference in players, which hasn’t been the case in a few patches.

Give up SFGY or SHGY to the Horde and strongly fortify the south bunkers. (Or yield the south bunkers and hold the line at Icewing Bunker.)

Direct the Horde to FWGY while IBT and TP are falling, then let the Horde go north unopposed to IBGY while the Alliance goes full on offense.

The Alliance can certainly win if the Horde is concentrated in FWGY, and it is preferable to concentrating the Horde at the RH. Is it the best option? No. But it’s not the worst option for graveyard control, so it’s worth pursuing.

THE ALTERAC CAMPAIGN

Back when Cynwulf was a 59 DK twink, I had a macro I would spam at the beginning of every Alterac Valley:

Welcome to AV! If this is your first time here, kill Galv, take the towers, kill Horde, defend towers until they fall, then kill Drek. Got it? Let’s go!

At level 60 (in WotLK), it’s really tough to get tanks who are geared enough to take on Drek/Vann+4. The Blitz is far too demanding at this level to have everyone do it all the time, and while there is still a rush down to Drek, it’s a controlled rush. Taking the towers while defending your own is the name of the game.

Unlike the previous two strategies discussed, this one actually relies heavily upon the PvP skills and abilities of the combatants.

Each force will send the majority of its forces towards the opposing captain on the other side of the Field of Strife. The Horde will charge through IBGY along the east side of the Field of Strife, while the Alliance will pass Bal’s bunker on the right and take the west side straight to Galv.

The majority of each force will go after the respective captain, while small teams tend to peel off to take the nearby towers and graveyards.

The initial rush changes the resurrection vectors substantially as graveyards are assaulted. If the towers are defended, casualties are going to start going back even further than the initial phase once the graveyards are assaulted, like so:

It’s at this point when PvP usually starts happening. Stragglers meet on the Field of Strife, some players like to stay back and defend the towers and captains, others turn back to help defend… it can become very chaotic at this time. Small unit tactics and individual contributions are essential during this phase — move in packs, protect your healers, engage when you outnumber the enemy, otherwise evade or slow them down to let others catch them.

You can see the value of a good midfield defense during this phase when graveyards are in play. Casualties will be sent all the way across the map and be taken out of the midfield arena if they die now.

By the time SHGY and IBGY change, both of the Captains are likely down, and the towers are either going or have gone down. This phase really depends upon your team’s ability to execute and then defend the targets as they are taken.

Once the graveyards have flipped, things polarize. If you win the fight at midfield, you’ll have the advantage going into the next phase.

All the casualties at midfield have become your defense, as their resurrection vector punted them back to either SPGY or FWGY. The strength of your defense is proportionately strengthened by how badly you were hurt at midfield, so while it’s possible to have two balanced battles going at once, in practice usually one or the other has the majority of players and becomes the central focus of the battleground.

Taking the graveyards on the opposite side of the Field of Strife polarizes the battlefield. In the previous phase, the emphasis is entirely upon midfield. Once the graveyards flip. you can see there’s a lot more corpse movement, both forward and backward. Capturing (and holding) graveyards on the other side allows your offense to establish a beachhead to launch their attacks. It also prevents a complete reset, like we see in a failed Blitz.

Consider the following example. The Horde having a strong offense that dominated at SHB/IWB and left enough people behind to inflict a lot of casualties on the Alliance offense at IBT/TP. There are more Alliance casualties than Horde casualties as a result of this phase. The Alliance force resurrecting at Stormpike will be larger than the Horde force going to Frostwolf, but the Horde offense moving north is larger, too. The battleground population shifts towards Dun Baldar. The Alliance offense down south becomes progressively weaker with no reinforcements, and while they are able to assault and hold towers until they fall, they are impotent to tackle Drek on their own.

From this phase, it’s a matter of execution. One side or the other will dominate and push forward into the enemy base, either pushing them aside (the lessons from Island Hopping apply here) or forcing them aside until they rez on the other side of the Field of Strife.

Whatever happens next, it’ll be epic. And it’ll be the Alterac Valley I love.

CAPTAIN’S GAMBIT

I’ll leave you with one last example of graveyard control in Alterac Valley for your consideration: the Captain’s Gambit.

The Captain’s Gambit is when you don’t defend your general, you defend your captain instead. As few as five and as many as twenty players peel off from the main assault and go into the captain’s bunker to help defend them. When the other side comes roaring in for the easy kill, they find considerably more than they bargained for and sustain heavy losses. If the defenders die, they are either sent to the midfield graveyard (if it hasn’t been assaulted), or the next defensive graveyard, SPGY or FWGY. Either result is fine for them as defenders.

The attackers, however, are sent back to a graveyard that is likely under assault. If enough casualties are inflicted, the offense is shattered and doesn’t have enough people to dominate any further conflicts.

Let’s take the example of the Alliance running the Captain’s Gambit on the Horde.

The Horde concedes Galv to the Alliance, focusing instead upon SHB and Balinda. The Alliance chooses to defend Bal. Galv falls easily, while Bal does not. The Horde offense is sent back to FWGY, while the main part of the Alliance offense is already on its way past Tower Point.

The result of the Captain’s Gambit is that the front moves very quickly from midfield to the FWGY/TP area, with the Alliance setting up a defensive bulwark at IBGY. Because the Horde advance was stopped so early on, no footholds are established for them to launch assaults on Alliance bunkers, so the Alliance defenders are able to move up to support the offense and support the push into Frostwolf Village.

The population of the battleground shifts to the south, and the front moves with it. The Horde is now at a disadvantage both in position and resources, as losing Galv and towers depletes their resource pool dramatically. Even if it turns into a slugfest by the Rock of Durotan and Frostwolf Village, the Alliance has the upper hand.

You will notice that I call this the Captain’s Gambit, not the Captain’s Sure-fire Way Of Winning Alterac Valley. That’s because there’s an element of risk and sacrifice involved.

First, the Horde could have chosen to skip Bal and go straight to Vann. If they’re Blitzing in any way, this is actually likely to happen. There might be a few stragglers who decide to take her out, but not enough to really make a difference. This is definitely the biggest risk — that the enemy will refuse to take the bait. The impact of this depends on how many people stayed to defend Bal. If it’s 5, okay, no big deal. Twenty? Yikes.

Second, there’s a sacrifice involved with the people who stay behind. They are going to have a hard fight on their hands. It’s not as easy to cause a raid to wipe with the Captain as it is with the Generals +4, and there’s every likelihood the defenders are going to get facerolled. But it’s not a hopeless task, and even failure just means moving further back in the defensive line, falling back towards your own base.

GRAVEYARD CONTROL

Alterac Valley makes a fascinating study of graveyard control because the graveyards are separate and distinct resources to capture. They’re also unrelated to the victory conditions of AV; they add no resources to your total, nor can they kill the enemy general for you.

Yet, they are a critical part of whatever strategy you adopt. Controlling where you will resurrect — and where your enemy will, too — is an important part of the battle. You have to understand resurrection vectors to be able to predict what is going to happen next within the battle, but also so that you can get better for the next one.

You’ll find this concept in every battleground with controllable graveyards. The lessons from Alterac Valley apply everywhere; Strand can be lost by capturing the wrong graveyard, and Isle of Conquest can be won by getting the Keep’s defenders out of the way with a graveyard snatch.

So, good luck out there. May the spirits of your enemies be sent to a place with no strategic value!

29 responses to “Graveyard Control in Alterac Valley”

The psychology of why different factions do well/poorly in different bgs in different battlegroups is fascinating. I’d love to see actual data on it before posting for real on it, but I’ve intuitively held that because AV’s map slightly favors Alliance, it drives good Horde PvPers away so AV becomes a losing proposition. Conversely, those PvPers migrate to WSG/AB and make life hell for Alliance.

Being much more a fan of low level PvP my experience until just a few months ago was all in WSG and AB. Moving into AV took my neat and tidy little world, shook it like an etch-a-sketch, and then beat me on the head with it.

I think the first three months I still had no idea where people were telling me to go unless they were talking about the captain/general. We’re going to blitz? Alright that one I know. Going to hit Galv? Cool, I tanked that sucker before. You want me to get IB-wha-huh? What are you yelling at me for? I saw a flag standing over there (FW) so I capped it for us. Yay me, right?

Heck, I still get Stonehearth, Iceblood, and Snowfall mixed up. I didn’t seriously get into AV until the blitz was the norm, or my faction sucked so horribly that it wouldn’t have mattered if I knew what I was doing or not.

As important as fighting on the flag is, I think this is really the key to pvp right here. Fighting on the flags is really more about GY control than anything else in the long run.

This post is the natural followup to FatF: I don’t think I could have articulated the importance of GY control until I looked at the tactics of fighting at the flags. AV is funny in that the GYs are totally separate, and you can win without ever touching one.

I’ve fought in… uh… almost 300 AVs, on both sides, and I still have to stop and think about SPGY, IWB and IBT. Once I counted up how many objectives there were for this post, I felt better about it.

Great article… But I’ll stick with my original thought: the blitz is a terrible concept that shouldn’t exist.

You shouldn’t be able to win a battleground without engaging in any PvP whatsoever.

OTOH, I like going on D just because a tank waltzing in with 53k health and a whopping 0 resi will easily get feared in a corner, where I then proceed to lock him using one of my trusty frostweave nets and laugh while Van quickly disposes of the intruder.

I think they learned a lit from the AV Blitz when designing the Isle of Conquest: forcing you to take and hold objectives means there’s more of a fracas and that the Blitz is impossible there.

That said, I’m okay with it as a part of the game. I’m not fond of how it’s going right now because the gear levels at 80 are too high for it, but that’s a recent development. It’s one of the ways to win, so I just accept that it happens.

That said, the Alliance on Ruin had repeated examples of how a strong defensive campaign can beat the Blitz every time. Their Blitz ran into our defenders every time, where we death-gripped, feared, typhooned, and mind controlled them into the blender known as Vann 4.

Hopefully those players will remember that the Blitz is never a sure thing, and strategy can beat a Zerg every time.

The maps used in this post are a bit old. The Horde cave was pushed further south than the Rock of Durotan several patches ago.

Considering that I play on the Horde side, it is interesting to see things from an Alliance perspective.

The typical strategy for both Alliance and Horde in my battlegroup is for both forces to attempt to zerg/blitz the opposing faction’s general and quickly win. In this case the ressurection vectors remain in their initial condition until the battle is won or someone changes it. The easiest counter is to simply slow the opposing faction at the choke points. Slowing the tank and/or healers and some DPS for just 20 seconds can swing the outcome in your faction’s favor. Hunters and Mages (numerous ways to slow) make the best defenders for Horde, while Hunters and Elemental Shaman (who doesn’t like knocking the opposing zerg off the bridge to their deaths?) make the best defenders for Alliance.

I admittedly didn’t use the in-game maps, but I thought the Horde Cave was pretty accurately positioned – it should be directly across from FWGY, maybe slightly to the south? The Rock is definitely north of it now, but it’s the closest landmark (much like Dun Baldar Pass). I haven’t seen either side get pushed back into their cave since I left the 50s bracket, so it doesn’t really affect anything.

In a Blitz vs Blitz situation, defense wins the day. Like you said, slowing ’em works just as good as stopping ’em. I’ve seen some great shaman defenders on the Horde side – drop totems on the upraised gate and watch the Alliance freak out – but nothing says fail like your entire raid running into a freezing trap that they can’t avoid while archers are whittling them down.

Pretty much all non end-game AVs turn out to be Alterac campaigns, at least with my experience. I personally love holding towers and bunkers. I love it when the zerg d comes to take back stonehearth bunker and you get killed defending right when it burns to the ground… satisfaction!

I was immensely heartened last night to log in to get screenshots and see that the Alterac Campaign was in full force. People were saying, “wow, this works so much better than the Blitz! I’ve won the last three games!”

The best games I have won have been complete domination, but then they have been organized groups.

Blitz’s are such “flip of the coins”.

Defending Van is just one of my all time favorite things to do… Not like you have to do much… Taunt the horde a little too close – Van takes care of them. Run around the corner a living bomb or two, blastwave, /chuckle and back to the relative safety of Van. It gets the Horde so riled up that they need to be organized to stop wiping before even entering Vans room.

I see how you were going crazy with your lines.

I told you to just do a blitz map – 2 lines, job done… But no, you had to write a brilliant guide instead!

A mage cast Living Bomb on me out in the hallway. I looked at it, looked at my fellow defenders, and teleported back inside and ran straight to Vann. The bomb went off, aggroed the entire room, and they charged out into the hallway to kill the mage.

I bet she was surprised!

Fearing people who poke their heads around the corner is another favorite of mine, as is running into the pack and triggering Howl of Terror. Sometimes you can get Vann running around so fast he looks like a little dwarf blender.

Great article. After leveling since 51 (now at 66) through mostly AV, I’ve seen every possible strategy. The Blitz has worked, but rarely. You need a well-oiled group for that. I do notice that the island-hopping-type strat seems to work the best. Kill Galv, grab (and defend) towers, kill Drek.

Obviously everything changes depending on what the other team does. I wish I could somehow easily point my AV teams to this article, because it would not only show them where things are, it would explain the strat behind everything. Most people just run around blindly until they see a red name and then their ADD kicks in and they fight.

@cynwise: This is a 10/10 post and why I am quickly becoming a CBM junkie. Please keep it up.

re: “the Blitz”. You and I traded tweets on the Blitz and AV yesterday and I have to reiterate my statements: I think the Blitz is a bane of level 80 AV and I think it is going to stay with us until Cataclysm, unfortunately. I would like to see Van/Drek scale with the average iLvL of the participants so the difficulty in achieving success is the same at any gear level. When WotLK dropped, Blitz was almost impossible, now it is almost impossible to not do it.

Re: “And it’ll be the Alterac Valley I love.” I am right there with you. This BG has the potential to allow the greatest PvP battles in the game anywhere. Small, individual efforts matter. Team efforts matter. Whole team efforts matter. Every level is rewarded for good, strategic play and that is what makes good AV’s so memorable and bad AV’s so common.

Re: AV tipping towards the Alliance and Horde avoiding it. I think this is more perception than an actuality. I cannot argue the against the awesome defensive bulwark that is the Dun Baldar Bridge, but I think it is less of a benefit than most of my fellow Horde think of it as. I view AV as more tipping towards defensive Alliance play and offensive Horde play.

Our (Horde) choke point is in front of 3/4ths of our towers and all of our graveyards. Holding IBGY and it’s choke point can be done with less people than the bridge as it offers a much faster resurrection vector. This allows the Horde D to move their lines up and offer potential skirmish teams against assaults on Galv and keeps the Alliance spawning at SFGY while Horde O takes and holds the SHGY choke point. As I will outline in a response I’m offering to this post, Horde can offer a counter to the Blitz without moving the defensive front back into the Keep.

Great post Cyn. One thing that amazes me is how often people click release immediately after they die in AV (especially tanks after a failed zerg).

Unless someone takes your insignia, it is almost always worthwhile to check your map and gy timers to see if waiting a couple seconds would make the difference between rezing at a nearby gy, or all the way across the map.

An advanced Alliance strategy I’ve seen implemented on several occasions (With PuGs no less) involved sorta splitting the Offense up into several groups. Grabbing SFGY to support an assault on IBGY and Galv. But afterwards, starts to get really interesting as it takes advantage of the Horde’s tendency to go for SPGY after assaulting SHGY leaving minimal defenses at the Bunkers and the GY itself. Meanwhile, say a 10 man Defense digs their heels in at the Bridge. Those on Offense meanwhile, sorta tap the bunkers periodically with a 5-10 man group but don’t go after the SHGY to keep bunkers from being destroyed, but keep Horde O falling to the Defense at DB from respawning in the way of the Alliance O (20-25 strong). However, after SPGY gets captured, the 10 man group of skirmishers turns their eye to SHGY and assault it, sending Horde that were defending it to SPGY. The Distance between SPGY and the Icewing chokepoint is slightly more than the distance between snowfall and the IW, and if it’s still in Alliance hands, likely to be respawning a rifleman or two.

The initial confusion, and indeed tunnel vision keeps horde from sending any serious effort to retake SHGY until about the time it gets recapped, as they’ll be focusing all their efforts on DB and the bridge. And everybody knows that 10 decent players + 2 Bunkers is more than enough to hold off even 40 Horde, especially if those 10 players also know a few extra tricks for defending (Kiting Hunter/Warlock pets to Druids for example). At this point in the match, for the Horde Offense to get to any additional objectives, they either have to go through the Bridge, or they have to go through the Icewing Bunker chokepoint and the Alliance GY that’s behind it relative to their current position. If your remaining Offense is good enough, they’ll usually have control of Relief Hut enough to take FWGY and leave a few players behind to kill off people trinketing back to the keep, while Alliance O choosing to do so can ride back to IWB or trinket to Aid Station… or going all in at Drek. Either way, the Horde find themselves at a serious strategic positioning disadvantage, and often won’t know what’s going on until its far too late. And even if they do end up breaking the Alliance D at DB, IWB will be reinforced further, and two Bunkers will still be solidly in Alliance hands vs the loss of all 4 towers by the Horde… this has a severe impact on both the number of reinforcements they’ll have remaining, and the amount of time it will take them to burn down the General and create additional risk (Apparently, MCing the Tank with a Nelf Priest is hilarious with 2/4 generals up).

Hi! I just found your article here and loved it! I’ve played quite a bit of AV now (at least 30+) and I’m STILL trying to figure out where everything is. As a mage, I find that the best way is to stick in the middle of the group and get myself down to Iceblood after taking out Galv and hopefully hold that, and help with the two towers – because if I get killed, I end up at some graveyard and can pretty much not get back unless there’s another group for me to latch on to. That is the strategy that seems to happen the most often when I play and when the group does something else, I would get confused. I didn’t know what “blitz” meant: once I read the description above, I realized that that is when we typically lose. Everyone ends up back at Stonehearth or Stormpike just trying to get out. This article helped a lot. I knew GYs were important (sometimes I let myself get killed when I know which GYs that would get me closer to where I was headed and it was apparent I wasn’t going to be able to survive for another 30 seconds and there is no healer around).

My biggest complaint about BG’s is that 1. Only one or two will set their roles. It’s nice for me to know who the tanks and healers are 2. When three different tanks (or more) have not decided on a strategy and go their separate ways, all screaming at each other (and the rest of us for not naturally picking THEIR decision as to how to go about it) and everyone just ends up falling further and further back (and losing) 3. just a general understanding that not everyone is experienced at BG’s, level 85 or no; a pure quester may have decided to get in the game. Annoying? Yes. We all just want to get the HP without having to constantly explain and possibly losing because of it. Screaming insults at them helpful? No. I personally think they should create a single roll that someone can volunteer to take that explains to those just following the herd what is going on and what needs to happen to those who need it. Not everyone will accept the help, and some are just plain ‘ol jerks who decide to mess around – or go AFK for the XP and HP. However, all of this should be expected to a certain degree. I don’t mind others getting testy with someone who insists that their way is right and they will go it alone if they have to.. or leave towers undefended (what is with some leaving a tower in the beginning once it’s taken: shouldn’t they hang around and defend unless called for?) I’ve seen a few actually help out and explain – that ALWAYS ends up being better in the end, win or lose.

Ok. I’m longwinded! 🙂 Thanks for your article. I’m pretty tempted to copy the URL and send it to those asking for help in game that they can look up later! 🙂

Horde on my battlegroup (Stormstrike) are using two strategies. The first is the uncoordinated blitz. Everyone charges pell-mell north and beats on things until they get to Van and realize that since they didn’t defend towers, they have to start over. The second is to cap SHB, IWB, SHGY, and defend TP, IBT, and IBGY. At that point, we focus on grinding the Alliance down until they run out of resources and lose. For someone who loves PVP, I definitely prefer the second method. Of course, to execute it the group has to buy in, and that can be a challenge.

I occasionally get into AV matches where 10 – 15 people peel off to defend Galv. That usually sets up the grind and even if they lose, it messes with the heads of the Alliance. They just fall back confused because it was so unexpected.

There is nothing I love more in AV than standing tall and punching the other guy in the mouth.

About CWM

Cynwise's Warcraft Manual is a weblog about many facets of the World of Warcraft: PvP battlegrounds, digital avatars, warlock theory, and having fun with alternate play styles are common topics.